|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Israel / Palestine |
|
Edward Said Has Died |
Current rating: 0 |
by AP
(No verified email address) |
25 Sep 2003
|
|
Effective spokeperson for Palestine dies from leukemia at age 67 |
|
NEW YORK (AP) -- Edward W. Said, a Columbia University professor and leading spokesman in the United States for the Palestinian cause, has died, his editor at Knopf publishers said Thursday. He was 67.
Said had suffered from leukemia for years and died at a New York hospital late Wednesday, editor Shelley Wanger said.
Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of British-ruled Palestine, but he spent most of his adult life in the United States. He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause but also on a variety of other subjects, from English literature, his academic specialty, to music and culture.
When it came to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Said was consistently critical of Israel for what he regarded as mistreatment of the Palestinians.
He wrote two years ago after visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israel's "efforts toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs" had actually strengthened Palestinian determination.
"Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel's concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective," Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Cairo.
In 2000, he prompted a controversy when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.
Said moved to the United States as a student. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1957 and a master's and Ph.D. from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964.
Most of his academic career was spent as a professor at Columbia University in New York, but he also was a visiting professor at such leading institutions as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
His books include "The Question of Palestine" in 1979 and "After the Last Sky" in 1986.
|
